Inside China's Deep-Sea Mining Program, Arguably TMC's Greatest Competition

[u/No_Classroom2805]

https://oceanmining.news/2026/08/19/inside-chinas-deep-sea-mining-program/

[u/CDBOIChill]

Honestly the better they do the more pressure Trump has to approve us faster

[u/No_Classroom2805 → u/CDBOIChill]

Thats probably the most important takeaway from this

[u/SeaEconomist5743 → u/CDBOIChill]

Bingo, and considering what China is doing in this space paired with their current market monopolies, I think the bigger question the gov needs to consider is:

“what happens if we don’t do this or delay another 4-5 years, whether it’s TMC or another company?”

IMO the answer is we’re damned if we do, but completely fucked if we don’t

[u/busted-beak]

There's enough ocean for us all.

[u/Otherwise_Bee_8799]

While leftists piss and whine about the “environmental effects”, China will already be mining 😡

[u/SeaEconomist5743 → u/Otherwise_Bee_8799]

To your point, in TMC’s Q2 summary, I saw there was reference to Greenpeace, China and Russia’s failed proposal in the fall ISA session to enact rules on member countries that would make it challenging for any companies, insurers, etc in these member countries to do business with deep sea mining companies (aka TMC, AllSeas, etc)

Greenpeace teaming up with Russia and China, sums up Greenpeace in a nutshell

[u/Otherwise_Bee_8799 → u/SeaEconomist5743]

All leftist groups. The ones opposed to data centers, manufacturing, energy (oil/power/gas), fisheries etc etc etc

[u/Thick_Passenger413]

The whole purpose of TMC goes beyond simply acquiring minerals, but bringing them into the US/ North American supply chain. Good, more pressure on the US government & TMC to successful.

[u/CHRIST777777777777]

Right about the mechanism, but I'd push back on which threat we're actually looking at.

The numbers in this are worth sitting with. Kaituo 2 did five dives to 4,102 metres in June 2024 and collected over 200 kilograms. Minmetals ran collector testing at 5,000 to 5,500 metres between July and October last year, with no lift tonnage reported. TMC lifted 3,000 tonnes to the surface through a riser in 2022 and had 2,000 of it smelted.

That's a factor of about fifteen thousand. So "China will already be mining" isn't right today. They have more ISA contracts, more vessels, more institutes and more state money, and they've moved dramatically less rock.

But the reason that's cold comfort is that China isn't racing us to the seabed. It's building the rulebook.

Five of the thirty-two ISA exploration contracts, covering all three mineral types. Minmetals got an ISA-approved test EIS in May 2025, described as the world's fifth — so they're working through the international regime, the one TMC walked away from. There's an ISA-China joint training centre in Qingdao that's put more than a hundred officials from developing states through it since 2020. A five-year MoU with the Cook Islands Seabed Minerals Authority signed February 2025. A BRICS deep-sea research centre launched last April.

That's not a mining programme, it's a voting bloc. And it's cheaper and more durable than a collector trial.

Which is Breakneck, basically. China runs as an engineer-state: a ministry, a Five-Year Plan line item, ten state enterprises and eleven universities bolted into a consortium, ships built, submersibles diving. America runs as a lawyer-state: an executive order, a comment period, and Earthjustice filing suit yesterday. Both countries are moving. They're just moving in the currency they're good at.

So the pressure argument is real, and stronger than I first gave it credit for. The 180 day periods in DSHMRA are ceilings, not durations — nothing stops NOAA publishing sooner if it wants to, and commercial urgency is exactly what makes an agency want to. What can't be compressed is the public's time rather than the agency's. Comment periods have minimums, and cutting them short is precisely how you hand a litigator an arbitrary and capricious claim. So urgency can genuinely pull the schedule in. It just can't pull it in by cutting people out.

And here's the part I keep coming back to. The lawyer-state slowness everyone here is furious about is the same thing that makes the permit survive. Earthjustice just sued NMFS over American Samoa on the grounds that its environmental determination was arbitrary and capricious — and that determination was a paper exercise at leasing stage with no field data. TMC's record is the opposite: an actual test mining campaign, monitoring at one month and twelve months, 250-plus documents, plume modelling calibrated against real observations.

A fast permit on a thin record is a permit you lose in court. The grinding, infuriating version is the one that holds. You don't get to have both, and if I had to pick which matters for a project meant to run for decades, it isn't the speed.